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British scientists led the creation of the first accurate 3D atlas of our galaxy, a map of approximately 1.8 billion stars that made it possible for the first time to accurately calculate the mass of the Milky Way.
The project, overseen by the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, found that our galaxy weighs about the same as a trillion suns – or the equivalent of a quadrillion Earths. A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.
The researchers were also able to measure the acceleration of our sun as it orbits the monstrous black hole thought to be at the heart of the Milky Way.
The new information was gathered by the Gaia satellite, a space observatory run by the
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